A Dyke A Broad #74 Angst Edition
Notes on Ukraine and violence against women at a women's march.
Hello from Paris!
Well… it’s sunny today. And if I look down on the top of the chestnut tree in the building’s back garden, I see that some of the giant buds are turning into leaves. It’s comforting that the land persists in doing what it does, and I don’t have to lift a finger to help. Which is good, because I’m so depressed I can barely get up to pee.
I try not to turn on the television. The images from the war in Ukraine are devastating, and while I think everyone should know what is going on, I can objectively say that it doesn’t help anybody when I get too freaked out to function.
I’m not alone in losing my mind. Journalists are speculating about nuclear bombs, and nuclear plant “accidents” manufactured by Putin. Potassium iodide is trending online. Even in Paris people are buying the pills which are supposed to help you in a “radiological emergency.”
Putin’s been accusing the Ukrainians of using chemical weapons and other illegal things, which is what he’s done in the past when he intends to use them himself. It’s become a question in my household—what do we do if Putin decides to start dumping them on us? Go back to the U.S.? I spent Sunday looking at maps of France, wondering if there was an innocuous corner with few population centers, no targets of strategic value.
Many analysts assume that even if Putin eventually loses, it won’t be until the war spreads further west.
Meanwhile, none of the economic measures taken against Putin seem to be having any useful effect. The Russian rich are deserting Moscow’s sinking ship, that’s all. Everyone trapped there will suffer, the propaganda machine telling them that the U.S. is torturing them for fun and profit.
In other news…
Women were attacked in several International Women’s Day marches in France, including Paris, Toulouse, and Strasbourg. The targets included lesbians like the group Résistance lesbienne, but mostly focused on groups of survivors of sex-trafficking, and forced prostitution carrying anti-prostitution signs, and other feminists critical of pornography. Their signs were ripped, and they were followed, insulted, threatened, punched, slapped, kicked, even bitten. Video below.
Tweets show their attackers co-ordinated in advance, and were encouraged by a range of groups including the ultra-left Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, STRASS—a self-styled “sex workers union” that demands lifting any and all restrictions to prostitution, and Act Up-Paris—which has long-standing activist links to Thierry Schaffauser, a board member and international P.R. guy for STRASS.
Schaffauser, who says he’s more proud of being a whore than of being a fag, has regularly published articles claiming sex-trafficking isn’t that big a deal (there are more than 4 million victims of sex trafficking globally—99% women and girls). He has repeatedly, and so far unsuccessfully, run for office, and is also a regular candidate on slates of the French Green party.
Like Putin, these aggressors accused their victims of provoking them, though the videos tell the real story, along with the screen-shotted tweets in which they rail against those TERFs and plan to go after them, and silence them.
Fuller reports (in French) here and here.
Want to Feel Better?
Consider donating to the European Lesbian Conference, helping dykes in Ukraine. They are “operating at the borders with Ukraine providing emergency support and housing, supplying essential goods and services, but also ensuring long-term solutions for refugees through our lesbian hosting network, as well as organising humanitarian aid for our community in Ukraine, in coordination with our partners NGOs.”
If you want to help Ukrainian women more generally, there are link’s in Caroline Criado-Perez last newsletter, Invisible Women - Helping Ukrainian Women on #IWD.
From Twitter
That’s it for this week.
Disgruntledly yours,